Paris Raises Its Silhouette, but Slowly and Not Easily

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CreditLaurent Cilluffo

By Stephen Heyman

June 3, 2015

Paris fiercely protects its skyline. On a clear day, you can stand on the steps of the Sacré-Coeur Basilica and take in the whole sweep of the city. No building seems tall enough to obscure the monuments, cathedrals and museums.

But a 2010 change to the city planning law is beginning to remake the city’s architectural profile, at least in its outlying arrondissements, where height restrictions that once kept new buildings below 37 meters (about 11 stories) have been substantially relaxed to make way for ambitious projects. Now, residential buildings can reach 50 meters and commercial buildings can theoretically extend to 180 meters, or twice as high as the spire of the Notre-Dame Cathedral.

By the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, in the 13th Arrondissement, a small building boom is underway, with the recent completion of the tallest residential building in city in more than 40 years: a gold- and aluminum-paneled housing development. The project, its architects told the design blog Dezeen, proves that tall is “no longer a taboo.”

The last generation of tall buildings in Paris date from the early 1970s. Among these are several brutalist towers in the 15th Arrondissement, in the Front de Seine neighborhood, that were used as a backdrop in a new Chemical Brothers music video directed by Michel Gondry .

Such vertical ambition was banned in 1977 after the construction of the Tour Montparnasse, which is deeply unpopular among Parisians and was once voted among the world’s ugliest buildings in an informal survey. During the ban, skyscraper projects were relegated to just west of Paris, in the business district of La Défense, where a pair of proposed towers by Norman Foster would become the tallest buildings in Western Europe if they open as scheduled in 2020.

A number of buildings proposed or under construction within the city limits are being built right up to the new height restrictions, including office towers by Jean Nouvel and the Dutch firm Neutelings Riedijk Architetects and another eye-catching residential building, the Tour de la Biodiversité, an 18-story structure whose façade is covered in vegetation.

But the relaxed height restrictions don’t always mean carte blanche for developers. Each project still needs to be approved by the City Council. The political deadlock surrounding the Triangle Tower, a skyscraper designed by the Swiss architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron and planned for the southwestern edge of Paris, near the Porte de Versailles, illustrates this point. It was rejected by the City Council in a narrow vote in November, although the mayor, Anne Hidalgo, is trying to get a revised design approved this year.

Mr. Nouvel, who called the Triangle Tower “one of the most incredible pieces of sculpture that I have seen in ages,” lamented the status quo in Paris. “There is this obsession in France that new architecture should not stand out,” he was quoted as saying in The Independent of London. “This causes a problem for towers, which must be visible and proud of themselves.”